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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26233879">Contrafactum</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/vorokis/pseuds/vorokis'>vorokis</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Devil May Cry</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon-Typical Violence, Getting Together, M/M, Potential consent issues: see a/n, Romantic Tension, Sexual Tension, Twincest</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 05:06:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,475</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26233879</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/vorokis/pseuds/vorokis</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A Nirlag must be hunted outside of its cave. The air of its sanctuary is treacherous; fatal miasma to a human and toxic enough to demonkind to steal away consciousness, leaving the body vulnerable to easy consumption. </p><p>Vergil had assumed his brother had known this but here he is anyway, staring down at the limp, graceless sprawl Dante makes on the forest floor, the tail of his darkly crimson coat spread out like the dulled leaf of an old, bloodied fan.</p><p>(Or: When Dante is rendered temporarily unconscious from a small demon hunt gone slightly wrong, Vergil ends up having a conversation with an interesting someone who has been waiting a long time to speak to him.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Dante/Vergil (Devil May Cry)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>210</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Contrafactum</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenZen_Travers/gifts">SenZen_Travers</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>An overdue gift for Sen, who is a sweet bean deserving of all the good things and who I hope likes this fic enough to forgive me for the lateness. If not, I'll just have to never leave my house out of shame, I guess.</p><p>While everything is in fact super consensual between the characters in this story, you might feel that there are some potential consent issues due to some of the things that happen in it. To be safe, you can skip to the spoilers in the spoilery end notes for more spoilery detail.  </p><p>ALSO, Very Important: I made the executive decision to ignore the LIES c@pcom are trying to feed us of the twins supposedly no longer being identical. Don't fall for their fiendish propaganda and enjoy the fic while at you're at it!!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>A Nirlag must be hunted outside of its cave. The air of its sanctuary is treacherous; fatal miasma to a human and toxic enough to demonkind to steal away consciousness, leaving the body vulnerable to easy consumption. </p><p>Vergil had assumed his brother had known this but here he is anyway, staring down at the limp, graceless sprawl Dante makes on the forest floor, the tail of his darkly crimson coat spread out like the dulled leaf of an old, bloodied fan. Dante's face is turned to the side, hair skewed in messy tufts, brow smooth and untroubled by whatever he sees or doesn’t see behind his closed lids.</p><p>Vergil nudges him with one foot. Dante doesn’t stir.</p><p>The Nirlag at least must be dead; no residual wisp of life emanates from the nearby cavern when Vergil reaches towards it with his senses. Somewhere in that musty darkness, the demon’s serpentine corpse is nothing more than a thin, flimsy husk that will soon enough go to dust and then to nothing at all.</p><p>Considering his brother again, Vergil mildly entertains the thought of leaving him right there on the ground. Perhaps dragging him by the foot through the rambling forest til they hit the creek Vergil's discovered to the east. Both options hold temptations—but graciously he brings himself to quash them, reaching down to fit his hand between his brother’s arm and torso and smoothly lifting Dante over his shoulder.</p><p>Being relocated does nothing to disturb Dante. He hangs serene and silent, a broad, solid stream of incredible heat. Beneath the sweat, the leather, the roses is a softer, private scent, one that would be found nowhere else but Dante's skin and Vergil's memories. </p><p>Holding his brother in place, Vergil turns and walks back in the same direction he’d arrived. The creek isn’t too great a distance away, its twisting contours and sleek body carving precisely through infernal earth, breathing out a faint, chill mist from the ice creatures that had inhabited it before Vergil had taken the Yamato to them. It’s the cleanest source of water—the only source of water—they’re likely to find for a while, a sensible location to rest. </p><p>In the cryptic, murky belly of the Underworld, time is infinitely harder to track. Half a human year might have already gone by, but the sky of the demon realm never changes from the dead gray of a storm forever building. Nothing interrupts Vergil as he walks. It's quiet. An ominous silence that, like every other silence of the Underworld, is always watching, predacious as anything else spawned here. Vergil's used to it. Had heard it often in his slow climb out of Hell, finds it almost comforting in its familiarity.</p><p>Dante likes to circumvent these silences with his fondness for meaningless chatter. He wields his flippancy deftly and weaves his words together in deliberate threads that never venture into dangerous territory. Vergil allows it, responds in kind, preserves this inchoate détente of theirs. Each step they take, their brutal history dogs them, a shadow at their back that they never turn their heads towards.</p><p>Admittedly, it hasn’t been unpleasant. For all their conflicts, he and his brother can come together with a fluent ease that would suggest there had never been a separation at all. No colossal abyss of years dividing them, no time lost like so much irrecoverable water slipping through their fingers. Just a smooth and endless seamlessness. Ringing perfection that they can only ever achieve together. The irony isn’t lost on Vergil.</p><p>Nor is the danger in the all too inviting allure of such a peace with Dante. The allure of Dante altogether.</p><p>As Vergil draws closer to the creek, the sighs of the air grow cooler and cooler against his skin. The pallid trees are without leaves, encrusted with glassy shards and pockets of snow, and Vergil walks beneath their glittering branches to set his brother down against the trunk of the tree nearest to the water.</p><p>Dante's head lolls gently to the side. He takes in another steady breath, continues sleeping a deeper sleep than what Vergil has seen from him yet.</p><p>Dante's tendency to feign sleep hasn’t escaped his notice. Beneath the hood of his closed lids, Dante's eyes remain open, alert, following the world around him, the changes and the constancies in its sounds and smells and threats. Following Vergil most of all, because they both know only Vergil could constitute any true threat. It’s not exactly unwise of Dante. It’s flattering, even.</p><p>Asleep like this, he is perfect prey and Vergil has to ignore the tantalizing call of his brother’s vulnerability as he looks over fine eyelashes, a soft, delicate mouth set like a gentle streak of blush within the darker silver of Dante's beard. His humanity has pressed lines of age into his face, but those lines are now gradually easing, reversing under the Underworld’s influence which sees them as anomalies; harm inflicted upon a demonic body. Soon enough, he and Dante will be perfect mirrors of each other once again, all parity restored to its rightful place.</p><p>Standing, Vergil unfastens the Yamato from her seat at his hip. “You know what to do,” he says, her murmur of acquiescence rippling evenly along his arm before the lithe steel length of her morphs, enlarging into crystal, luminous and white. She hovers fixed in the air in front of Dante, her intricate conglomeration of spikes a devoted shield for his brother.</p><p>The precaution is more out of habit than any real anticipation of attack. Since they’ve stepped into the forest’s dense walls, its secretive biota has kept itself hidden, scuttling in the shadows with the faintest of sounds. He and Dante are among the more dangerous creatures walking the breadth of the Underworld; that in itself guarantees a measure of safety and there is no wariness in Vergil as he shrugs out of his coat and approaches the tranquil, silvery slip of the creek.</p><p>At this relatively shallow point, its water is no higher than his knees. It carries no distinguishable scent, frozen fragments drifting idly across its languid surface like leaves frosted over: the last, lucent suggestions of the demons that had called it home. Vergil looks at his reflection. His hair is no longer as neat and short as he’d prefer. A beard of his own is thick around his mouth and along his jaw, prickling his fingers as he runs a hand over it.</p><p>Folding his coat, he sets it to one side, removing his gloves and boots next. He unbuttons the first layer of his vest, unzips the second, leaves them hanging open to step into the water, weathering its sharp, zinging bite to clean his hands and arms. The looser dirt comes off with ease, the more stubborn streaks he rubs at firmly.</p><p>Cupping handfuls of water, Vergil pours them over his head. There’s nothing to help him in cleaning his hair more thoroughly, but he tries anyway, fingers working steadily until the strands run somewhat sleeker. They fall heavy over his forehead and frame his face, his image in the rippling water resembling the Dante he'd fought atop the Temen-ni-gru all those years ago. </p><p>It’s as he’s cupping another handful of water that he senses it: a sharp spike in demonic energy and then movement darting somewhere behind him in a quick, near-soundless slice.</p><p>Vergil glances over his shoulder. The Yamato still hovers where he had left her, but Dante—</p><p>Dante is gone. Vanished into thin air, seemingly never having existed.</p><p>The forest retains its perfect stillness and betrays no whisper of his brother.</p><p>Vergil reaches out for scent, sound. Dante’s presence emits a signal of its own, a kind of song that rolls its humming melody across Vergil’s skin and sinks down into it, murmuring its susurration throughout the current of his blood. In their childhood years, though he’d stubbornly tried many times, Dante had never been able to catch him by surprise.</p><p>The air shifts once more—Vergil perceives it from the side this time and listens to the water of the creek leap and splash as something cuts through it with missile precision, heading his way.</p><p>Vergil doesn’t bother blocking. Doesn’t need to. The Yamato is already there, smoothly intercepting, and the blow aiming for him strikes hard against her impervious crystal skin.</p><p>"Did you really think you could catch me off guard,” he says, turning his head towards the low eruption of guttural laughter shot through with resonant inhuman inflection.</p><p>“I had to try at least,” Dante says, stepping to the side and back into Vergil’s line of sight. Water dances around his knees where he stands two feet away from Vergil. His eyes have ignited, shining bright and blazing golden, the closest thing to a sun the perpetual gloom of this world would ever know. The smile on his face is a scythe, sharpened with a savageness that could only precipitate unapologetic violence.</p><p>Vergil would come away with sliced fingertips if he touched that smile. He’s seen it before, when Dante is lost in battle, adrift in his own blood-lust, wild-eyed and barbaric, all humanity shoved down deep beneath a canopy of armored scales and flaming light.</p><p>Vergil sees that smile and knows at once who he is speaking to. “It’s been a long time,” he says. “Demon.”</p><p>“Too long, <em> brother</em>,” replies Dante's demon, smiling harder, baring teeth not quite fangs but still too sharply tapered. The words seem to linger in the distance between them, his voice resounding with a dissonant echo from the two vastly different throats he speaks from at once.</p><p>It’s always a peculiar thing to have the demon take over, abruptly forcing you into the background, the strange shadows of yourself. It had happened to Vergil more often as a child, when his control over his monster was not yet refined and he’d dreamed of mangled bodies and deep hunger, raw, rank bloodshed, only to wake with the taste of demon flesh in his mouth and know that his dreams had not been merely dreams.</p><p>“I’ll admit,” he says, “I wasn’t expecting to be speaking with you.”</p><p>“I simply couldn’t resist such a perfect opportunity. It won’t be long until he’s awake again.”</p><p>“What exactly made this opportunity so hard to resist?”</p><p>“You, of course,” the demon says in a near-purr, jagged as the sound is. “You’ve kept me waiting.”</p><p>His eyes rake over Vergil in a slow, flagrant dissection that strips Vergil of his clothes and then strips him even further from skin to bone. The appraisal is shameless, openly lustful. A mouth running all over Vergil, a voracious feasting on everything he is. The demon licks his lips, the musk of arousal beginning to curl from him, and Vergil almost feels the wet heat of that slick muscle.</p><p>His own appeal has never eluded Vergil. His body has always been a perfect construction. His face attracts attention easily, stirs desire effortlessly. It’s nothing for him. It means nothing to him.</p><p>Nothing, unless it’s Dante whose attention he’s attracted and whose desire he’s stirred. It’s the demon who shares Dante’s face, his body, who knows his secret thoughts and buried lust and who looks at Vergil as if the demon shares those same thoughts and lust.</p><p>"I hadn't realized you were waiting for me at all," Vergil says.</p><p>"There was never a possibility of anything else." The demon’s devouring gaze slides leisurely back up the length of Vergil’s body to catch his eyes. “Still so fucking beautiful,” he says, “just like back then,” and sentiments that should have languished into nothingness a long time ago rustle hard in Vergil’s chest with fresh life.</p><p>He dismisses their fervent whispering, pushing aside how his skin comes prickling awake at such obvious, absolute adoration. “Don’t be offended if I don’t return the compliment," he replies, keeping aloof. </p><p>“You wouldn’t be you if you made it easy.” The demon tilts his head in curiosity. “Are you going to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about?”</p><p>Frankly, Vergil is inclined to do just that.</p><p>By silent mutual agreement, he and Dante evade it: what had hung unsaid and unaddressed between them in their teenage years, what still continues to hang between them even now in the Underworld, unremitting, undying. Vergil has felt its unwavering weight against his body from the first time his eyes fell on the tempting curve of Dante’s smirking mouth at eighteen.</p><p>Dante is beautiful, still; he was never not going to be, and decades later Vergil’s eyes have yet to look away.</p><p>“This is a conversation better had when my brother has returned to himself again.”</p><p>“You mean those conversations where you both talk but not really <em> say </em>anything?”</p><p>Vergil concedes a little smile. “So that’s why you’re here? To say what needs to be said?”</p><p>“I don’t hide from the truth. I want what I want—” the demon’s gaze once more pressing its possessive edge all along Vergil, hungering to cut a claim into his skin with eyes alone— “and I’m not afraid to admit it.”</p><p>“You’re not afraid to take it.”</p><p>“A philosophy you approve of.”</p><p>“Try it,” Vergil says. His power uncoils and strums inside of him, strong, vigilant, ready to slip its restraints and indulge freely in the brutality it longingly dreams of all day. “See how far you get before I put you in the ground.”</p><p>The demon lets out a deep hum that approximates a tightly controlled lascivious moan. “Threaten me again,” he says, grazing the rough caress of his voice against Vergil. “I’ve missed all the nice things you say.” He moves forward with an unnaturally fluid grace charged with the dangerous sensuality of beastkind, but he doesn’t get far. The Yamato obstructs his path in warning and he makes a disgruntled sound. ”She always was troublesome. Constantly interfering in my efforts to get to you.”</p><p>“It’s called loyalty," Vergil corrects, "and being good at what she does.” He touches gently at the thread connecting him to her and sends a command skittering across it. The Yamato complies with the cool brush of a winter wind against his mind, spinning aside to free up the path between him and his brother’s demon.</p><p>“Much appreciated,” says the demon. </p><p>“It wasn’t for your benefit. I just prefer to subdue you myself.”</p><p>“Always so arrogant, but I can’t say I don’t enjoy that about you. Makes you <em> fun</em>.”</p><p>“Consider returning the favor some time,” Vergil says, the demon arching an eyebrow at him. “Or else I’ll start to get bored with you.”</p><p>“You insult me. I can’t let that stand now, can I?”</p><p>More pressure loads the air surrounding them, infusing it with palpable force: the demon's influence, Vergil's, a thickening convergence of their overflowing strength. Each breath Vergil takes crackles through him, each exhale turned into soft lightning filaments.</p><p>Twists of radiant amber and scales of shadow rise out from beneath Dante’s human skin as if the demon’s true body is trying to escape through in bright and dark slivers. Something sharp, pulsating with the hunger of a living thing slinks under the veneer of his seemingly casual smile—Vergil sees the snaking shape of it easily, feels a kinship with it, a communion shared between untamed animals. It lives and breathes in him too, in the answering growl vibrating in his throat and the claws edging out from beneath his nails. Familiar blood-lust already coats the back of his aching teeth.</p><p>There’s no real warning. Dante’s demon is simply standing there one moment and then striking the next, darting forward in a glowing stream of carmine like fire set running free and wild.</p><p>Vergil strikes back without hesitation. There’s no need to think when there is smooth instinct to take over. Violence is cell-deep knowledge for someone like him, laid in far too deep in the body to ever be erased. Even when he couldn’t remember his own name, he’d still remembered how to fight and how to kill.</p><p>Dante’s power arcs in lashing roars, restless and chaotic, chittering loudly. Vergil’s own power soars higher, streaming torrential through every part of him to crash against his brother’s in swift ice floods, its electric rush welcome after too long spent with just dying dregs sparking weakly within him. There’s a simple pleasure in a brawl, Vergil finds. The rupturing of Dante’s skin under the force of his knuckles is symphonic. The bones beneath break in a neat, beautiful sequence that he could write a song to. </p><p>The demon smiles with red in his teeth from the puncturing of organs. He happily dislocates Vergil’s shoulder and gouges open what he can of Vergil’s sternum like he wants to get straight to the pulp of Vergil’s heart. The water of the creek turns a diluted pink and swirls hectically with each quick, bright collision between them. It slips down Vergil’s face, his bared chest, the length of his arms. It clings to Dante’s hair and rolls along his throat in gossamer rivulets, his clothes adhered to his body and revealing all the strong lines of him.</p><p>The demon smirks with arrogant triumph when he notices Vergil’s lingering eyes. “Somebody likes what he sees," he says, sly-soft. "Do you want to know the thoughts your brother's had about you? The dreams and desires we both share when it comes to you? I could tell you every desperate need and dirty fantasy. We’re especially fond of your hands, you know.”</p><p>Curiosity heaves up in Vergil all at once, keen and greedy for every indecent detail, and he has to beat it down, blinking his eyes against the deluge of obscene images that comes surging in, wave after wave of Dante naked and needy, Dante indulging his secret, buried lust, Dante gasping and shivering in the tight grip of pleasure, a hand between his legs and come on his belly and Vergil’s name on his moaning mouth.</p><p>“That’s right,” croons the demon. “Imagine it. I know you want to know. I know you want us back.”</p><p>“You truly like the sound of your own voice,” Vergil says.</p><p>The demon’s laughter comes out like the grinding of rocks. A playful look takes residence on his face, both coy and predatory, savage and seductive. “I like it when you look at me like that. Like you’re going to tear my heart out with your teeth and fuck me raw at the same time. Gets my cock harder than anything.”</p><p>“What predictable inclinations, but I suppose we all must have some.”</p><p>“As if you don’t share my <em> inclinations</em>.” Leaning towards Vergil, the demon breathes in visibly, his eyes closing, his chest rising with the slow, long inhalation, dragging something in from the air and reveling in each delectable note of it. “Mine,” he says, his rasp awash with heavy floods of rampant desire. “Mine to claim, mine to have—” Then displeasure suddenly twists the demon’s mouth, his bright eyes opening, hardening. “Except I haven’t yet. Claimed you. Had you.”</p><p>Vergil laughs, derisive. “Clearly I’m not yours as much as you’d like to believe.”</p><p>“You are,” the demon counters bluntly. “You’re ours, but you refuse to <em> be </em>ours. You keep denying us. It’s infuriating.”</p><p>“You sound entitled.”</p><p>“I am. I'm the only one entitled to you. If I had my way, no one else would so much as breathe near you. I’d kill them all and keep you all to myself.”</p><p>“And unsurprisingly deranged," Vergil says dryly. "How charming.”</p><p>"Don't lie now. You are charmed." </p><p>Vergil's reply is to throw his laughing brother-demon out from the confines of the creek and through the trunks of the nearby trees, but he also understands. The same vicious, insatiable cravings prowl within him, eternally famished, growling at each and every sighting of Dante.</p><p>The demon comes rushing back, lava-flow fast, burning bright enough to sear away shadows, and Vergil thinks once again of how they could traverse the entirety of the Underworld and still never find anything in it as vivid and alive as Dante. With a liquid slide forward, he meets the demon halfway and they end up on the ground, the earth cracking and peeling apart, sinking as Vergil slams the demon down into it, trapping him beneath himself with a clawed hand, the five spikes plunged into the demon’s chest.</p><p>The trails of scales running across the demon's face flare into larger metallic streams, but his retaliation is nothing more than the lock of his legs closing around Vergil’s waist, forcing their hips into alignment and their cocks into a harsh grind of blunt bliss. His brother's demon moans, a sound so purely sexual, so satisfied, the feel of Vergil against him somehow fulfilling a basic need of his body. Vergil grits his teeth, swallowing down the sound straining his own throat and keeping his claws just where they are, scraping through flesh and ribcage.</p><p>The demon slides a hand upwards to grab tightly at Vergil’s nape. “Got you,” he says, but his whisper lacks the mischief he’s exhibited until now, in its place an odd authenticity.</p><p>”It seems you've changed the rules of the game,” Vergil says. "Or you were playing a different game altogether."</p><p>The demon simply stares up at him, seeming distracted now that Vergil is within reach. Seeming entranced, mesmerized by him; memorizing him. He reaches up and presses his claw-tips to Vergil’s cheek. The touch draws no blood. Too gentle. Benign. Something a demon should not know. “Vergil,” he murmurs, the first time he’s spoken Vergil’s name and he says it as if the word is a complete meal in itself, sumptuous and to be held delicately on the tongue, carefully and faithfully savored.</p><p>That stir in Vergil's chest again of surviving sentiments. It moves in a deeper place within him this time, a more hidden chamber. A space where the soul might live and where that soul might ripple as though it wants to leave its place inside Vergil and move closer to his brother’s demon.</p><p>"Why do you look at me like that," Vergil says, steady as he can. "<em>How </em> can you look at me like that?"</p><p>"Because you achieved what shouldn't be possible. I should congratulate you."</p><p>“You can congratulate me by explaining yourself and telling me finally what you’ve come out to say.”</p><p>"I was asleep," the demon replies, "for a long time, and then you woke me. You were the first thing I saw and I've wanted you ever since." The rasp and gravel reverberation of his low, dual-toned voice is impossibly intimate: the voice of a lover. “It wasn’t a demon’s natural instinct for greed that taught me desire. It was you, Vergil.”</p><p>Tremendous <em> heat </em>in that truth. It scalds Vergil, strokes him. Makes him understand that his brother’s demon is not merely entitled and deranged but also—</p><p>“Lovesick.”</p><p>The demon tightens his jaw. “You did this to me. Made me this way. I even mourned you in my own way.”</p><p>“Dante is one thing. What did you have to mourn?”</p><p>“Our future together. What we should have been. I remember killing you and it’s only right that I was the one to kill you, you’re mine to kill, but I—I regretted it.” A crease disturbs the demon’s brow, sowing it with confusion as if even so many years later the emotion still defies his understanding. “I’d never felt regret before. I’m demon. I was never meant to know it. Or know loss. <em> Love</em>.” He spits out the last word like it’s an abomination and yet his hand on Vergil’s face remains calm. “You taught me those things and I should kill you again for it.”</p><p>“But you won’t.”</p><p>“But I won’t.”</p><p>“You can’t. Your feelings for me won’t let you.”</p><p>"Does it make you proud? Does it flatter you to know what a victory you've won against me and all without even trying?" </p><p>Vergil doesn't speak. Finds himself incapable for a long moment, a taste in his mouth that's too heady to speak through, exhilarating like another fruit of unparalleled power from the Qlipoth but so much sweeter, sweeter beyond belief because this is Dante and this is Dante's demon. "Yes," he says. Anything else would be apparent for the lie it is. "You're not the only entitled one here."   </p><p>"So you see we’re fated. Maybe that’s why you chose to fall. Maybe that’s why you knew you had to come back.” The demon's unblinking eyes are searching and searching, gliding all along Vergil, his skin, his bones, grazing his heart and seeking the secrets sheltered there. “You turned away from me all those years ago. Will you turn away from me again now?”</p><p>Vergil had thought of Dante often. Days upon days—what in actuality had been years upon years—where his head had been full of nothing but Dante. He’d walked the Underworld to find one of the elusive tears between the realms and he’d done it to see his brother, defeat him, but above all: to satisfy the immortal pull in his body that keeps him unfailingly oriented towards Dante like a compass pointed towards magnetic north.</p><p>“If I’d had any such intention," he says, "I would’ve already done it by now.”</p><p>The demon, still with his alien gentleness, moves his hand down Vergil’s face, down towards the edge of his jaw. His eyes have fallen to Vergil’s neck. His thoughts are clear. </p><p>“No," Vergil says. He removes his claws from the demon’s chest and seizes the wrist before it can touch his throat. “That won’t be happening.”</p><p>The demon narrows his eyes. “You said you have no intention of turning away.”</p><p>“That doesn’t mean I’ll wear your mark on my neck.”</p><p>“It’s our way.”</p><p>“It won’t be mine. I’ll never be bound to anyone like that.”</p><p>In truth, a binding has already happened. It happened the moment Dante followed Vergil into existence. But for it to deepen and branch out into possession, branding him and proclaiming itself on his skin, the shadow of fang marks haunting his throat—</p><p>Perhaps in another life, Vergil might have been Dante’s in all the ways he could be, but in this one he knows far too well what it means to be leashed, a voice not his own overfilling his head, a name not his own snaring him into servitude, the metal prison of a cursed armor sewn deep into his flesh. The entrapment had been so meticulous that it had taken death at his brother's hand to free him and even then insidious sickness had been left behind, slowly, assiduously killing him again, poison in his sludge-like veins, skin withering as if decomposition had already set in. </p><p>”Because of that pathetic would-be god. <em> Mundus</em>." The demon's eyes flash, bursting into brighter flames around the midnight core of his slitted pupils. His vibrant scales shape and reshape themselves in angry, agitated spirals. “Now you really are insulting me.”</p><p>“And for once it isn’t even my intention.”</p><p>“I’m nothing like him. I’d be nothing like him.”</p><p>“I know." That much comfort, little as it may be, Vergil is able to give. “But it is what it is and you will accept it.”</p><p>"If I won’t?”</p><p>“You will,” Vergil says again, an imperative, “if only because you want me to want your claim. You want to luxuriate in my agreement to it or else it would be without meaning. A pitiful, hollow conquest that would taste like ash, and I <em> would </em>make it taste like ash, demon. You said I taught you regret; I would teach you infinitely more of it if you insist on taking what I'm not willing to give.”</p><p>The demon is unmoving beneath Vergil. Rigid with tension, besieged beneath the skin by the war that Vergil's denial and defiance has just set off within him. Vergil feels weight return to the air, power viscous and snapping erratically, bearing itself down against his shoulders in challenge. </p><p>He doesn't acknowledge it, give way to it, watching silently, waiting to see what it'll be: attack or acceptance. He might've felt some kind of pity if he didn't mean his own words so much.  </p><p>"You," the demon says eventually, "continue to infuriate me." His growl is softened and sanded-down. Tinged with the mourning he should’ve never known but does because of Vergil. “What we should’ve been is still gone forever.”</p><p>Vergil shakes his head. “Isn’t it enough that I am here again? That alone means there are still many futures left to us.”</p><p>He sees one right in front of him, right there on the curve of the demon’s mouth—Dante’s mouth, no less tempting now than it had been in their teenage years. This future has been waiting for them from the first, quietly and patiently. </p><p>The demon sees Vergil see it. “Show me,” he says. The hand that has never left Vergil’s nape encourages him to lean down. “Show me another future of ours.”</p><p>Vergil allows him to taste it.</p><p>The kiss has none of the violence that comes so naturally to them. It’s a careful and slow, lush discovering, tasting of what fire must taste like, burning sweetly against Vergil's lips. It's every intoxicant in both worlds merged into one, dangerously addictive, and the demon makes a sound, or Vergil does, or they both do, a pained sound as if something is breaking piece by piece in them with each softly hungry slide of their mouths. Something is being delicately fixed at last.</p><p>“I could give you this at least,” Vergil says, breathing it out into that small, heated space between their mouths where it'll be safe.</p><p>“I’ll never stop wanting everything you are,” the demon says, raggedly as if Vergil's ransacked him. It's not a warning or a threat, just the simple reminder of a fact. A demon who wants less than everything is no demon. “I’ll still take what I can get.”</p><p>He sounds like a starved creature, looks like one, feverish at the eyes, mouth parted like he needs to take in even Vergil's breath—then he kisses as a starved creature, silky wet mouth turning fierce and greedy against Vergil’s, hands shoving beneath Vergil’s open vest to run over his skin with ravenous desperation, trying to pull him closer, closer, into him. Vergil buries his own hands in the demon’s hair, gripping tight and kissing back just as fiercely, demanding everything and yielding nothing. </p><p>“I knew,” the demon rumbles, “I knew you would taste this fucking good,” as they take and take and take from each other’s mouths, breath, heat, never-ending gluttony all hopelessly entangled together. “I can’t wait to sink my teeth and claws and cock into you.”</p><p>It comes back into plain view, the predatory maw of his hunger, how much it wants to bite Vergil in half, so Vergil bites it back, closing teeth on the demon’s lower lip. “It’ll be the other way around,” he says over the demon's groan-growl. “I’ll enjoy making you eat your words. I’ll make you enjoy it, too.”</p><p>“Arrogant.”</p><p>“I hear it makes me fun.”</p><p>The demon's burst of laughter is sudden, raw. <em> Fond</em>. “Now who let that slip?” He feeds from Vergil's mouth, groaning, shuddering with pleasure, Vergil thinking, <em>Yes, shiver for me</em>, but it isn't long before his lips begin to slow, coming to an inevitable pause. His attention wavers, pulling inwards with a distracted murmur of, “He’s waking. My time is over now.”</p><p>“You’re hardly going far," Vergil says, reaching with reluctant fingers for the restraint that would let him let go of the slick lips against his. "I’m sure there'll be other opportunities to speak again.”</p><p>“You almost sound like you want that, Vergil.”</p><p>That voice like thunder smoothed out into silk, his name set within it like a precious jewel. Vergil drinks in the music of it. "It turns out you’re not a bad conversationalist.”</p><p>“A compliment at last.” Bringing his hands up, the demon frames Vergil’s face in a cradle of claws. He takes a moment, then in the soft husk of a breath: “Given time, he would wear your claim. Given time—I’d allow it.”</p><p>A trill runs through all the parts of Vergil that aren't above hypocrisy and selfishness, that want forever to take and never give, that look at Dante and only understand <em> mine, mine, mine. </em>He still makes himself say, “Even with the terms unfair and pitted against you?”</p><p>“It’s you,” the demon says. Just that. As if it’s the only explanation that matters. He presses his mouth to Vergil’s, letting his fangs out until their lips run wet from the violence of his tenderness and the kiss becomes a pact sealed by blood.</p><p>Just as he'd sensed his emergence, Vergil senses the exact moment the demon's presence recedes back into his hidden home within Dante. He draws away as Dante's legs let go of him, his hands falling from Vergil's face and his eyes losing their preternatural gleam, reverting back to familiar pale blue. Clean of scales and light, his skin is a more ordinary landscape. Strikes Vergil as wrong to be so mundane. </p><p>“That was—” Dante says. Doesn’t finish. He sits up carefully. Doesn't look at Vergil, either, his unruly hair helping to obscure his gaze.  </p><p>Vergil doesn't make him, sitting back on the ground at one side. His body, warm, overwarm, still registers the coolness of being separated from his brother like a loss. “How is it that your demon is far more eloquent than you, Dante?”</p><p>Dante is quiet. Distant. Evidently sifting through what his demon had done, what Vergil had done with him. "Seems," he says slowly, "like the two of you had an interesting time." He licks his lips, a careful swipe that takes longer than it should like he’s running into and stalling at left-behind traces from the meeting of their mouths. Or like he's deliberately seeking them out. </p><p>“That’s one word for it,” Vergil says. "Are you displeased?"    </p><p>Dante should be sealing himself up right now, sealing himself away behind the bricks of his wall: a smile that doesn't reach his eyes, eyes that offer up nothing but empty lucency. Instead he says, “You didn’t push him away. You kissed him." His fingers curling upwards, maybe with an urge to touch his own mouth. "You wanted to." </p><p>There's no other reply to that, really, other than, “I did.”  </p><p>"He beat me to it, huh." It's barely anything like his usual teasing nonchalance. Not offhanded enough, sounding too honest. Dante must realize it if the way he tightens his mouth is any indication. "The things he told you, I didn't want you to find them out like that.”</p><p>"Would I have ever found them out? We're good at pretending, you and I. Too good. He was right about that." </p><p>"Yeah." Dante still doesn't turn his face towards Vergil even as he hoarsely admits, “He was right about all of it. It was all true." </p><p>Vergil finds himself asking, "So what are we to do with all this truth, little brother?" and then he pauses, wonders at his own question, why it slipped from his mouth when he already knows what they're going to do: more of their usual stalemate, more of the pretense they're so skilled at. </p><p>Dante's lack of a reply merely proves Vergil right. His brother's silence stretches out into further silence, so Vergil nods, rising to his feet. His chest feels curious. Illogically empty in a way that makes him think of that rippling thing in him that had wanted to lean towards Dante's demon, the thing that might have been his soul. Absently, he glances at the creek, its serene water running clear again. "Neither of us expected this turn of events," he says. "We can always forget it happened.”</p><p>Though he never really will and suspects Dante won't, either. The softness of his brother’s mouth will always stay with Vergil. He'll always remember how Dante's demon tastes of what fire must taste like and had burned Vergil's lips with steadily kindled pleasure.</p><p>By some miracle, his clothes and boots are still waiting for him exactly where he'd set them down and Vergil heads over, his hands moving over his vest to close its layers up again. </p><p>His fingertips have barely touched the first of his boots when he hears Dante make a short, sharp, frustrated sound, followed by a quick, fervent mutter of, "<em>Fuck it</em>.” </p><p>Vergil's attention hones back in on his brother.  </p><p>“Just—fucking fuck it," Dante mutters furiously. </p><p>The same darting, near-soundless slice through the air as before and Vergil turns around just as Dante reaches for him, his fingers encircling Vergil's wrist but only for an instance, swiftly gentling and drifting down Vergil's hand to curl loosely around his fingers.</p><p>“What if," Dante says tightly, swallowing, "what if forgetting's not what I want?” and he's meeting Vergil's eyes finally and Vergil understands why Dante had evaded his glance until now. There’s too much nakedness in that face, a terrain bared to its fundamental roots like Dante's still struggling to veil everything his demon had unearthed. He looks at Vergil not with the barefaced lust his demon had first displayed but with the later softer expression, the more solemn, profound yearning.  </p><p>Vergil's pulse picks up at his temples. Thunders down into his not-empty chest, every other part of him. </p><p>"What if that's not what I want, Vergil?" Dante says, and the space between them shifts just like that, tautening, singing with promise, possibility. Culmination.</p><p>It's ready to bloom open like a flower and transubstantiate from potential that’s been building for years, through separations and reunions and death and near-death, into a reality they might have always been heading towards.</p><p>"I can't give you everything," Vergil reminds him, has to, needs Dante to be certain before they change everything between them forever.  </p><p>Dante glances at Vergil's throat—fleetingly. Fleetingly like it doesn't matter so much in the grand scheme of things. "I told you," he says. "He was right about all of it. He was right when his only explanation was that it's you. The future you showed him, me, that's enough." He shrugs. Smiles, small and helpless and sincere. "More than."  </p><p>Dante's sea-glass eyes are fixed on Vergil, placing him at the center of their universe, and beneath them, Vergil knows now more than ever, is a brighter gaze, golden, incandescent with violent love for him. Love where there should be no love; love that had been born only because of Vergil and knows only his name and lives just for him.</p><p>Vergil looks into both of those gazes as he steps closer, leaning in towards his brother. “Then that future is already ours,” he says and fits their mouths together, making his own words yet another truth.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>1) Spoilery details on the potential consent issues: Dante's demon assumes control over Dante's body while he's out cold from a demon attack. The demon and Vergil kiss and get a little frisky, but none of that is anything that Dante himself doesn't want and it isn't an issue as far as he's concerned. </p><p>2) <i>Contrafactum</i>: (in music) The substitution of one text for another without substantial change to the music. </p><p>AKA words you learn when googling why Japanese stores at closing time play a song with Japanese lyrics set to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne". Methinks it happens to be a good word for one way to look at the relationship between the twins and their demon half/human half and/or even the relationship between the twins themselves.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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